We need a new kind of expert — one whose expertise is hard-won through direct experience and whose point of view is both flexible and principled. We need people who have a deep sense of the world’s inner workings and interdependencies and who are comfortable in multiple settings and speak multiple national and disciplinary languages. These should be people who can absorb new material very quickly, and then improve it as they share it with others. We need to rely on people who are more than just an “expert” on any one topic, but across topics

We don’t need to do away with experts entirely. Instead, let’s update and refine what it means to be an expert in the 21st century.

This tension I noted, is one of the primary ones I exposed in Net Work: “Outcome v s. Discovery.” Tensions, I wrote, “are present all the time; both leaders and members of a network should be aware of how these tensions impact the health of a network. All networks will shift along these lines of tension as they respond to changes in the environment, changes in the demographics of their members, and changes in purpose, structure, and style.”